Dil Se..

Synopsis

India. Amar, a journalist, travels from Delhi to Simla in the north to report on a terrorist group fighting for an independent homeland.

At a station he sees Meghna and falls desperately in love with her but she avoids him, escaping on the first train. In Simla Amar begins investigating the terrorist group. Seeing Meghna again, he pursues her to her village but to get rid of him she tells him she's married. Later her brothers grab Amar and beat him up. Pursuing the terrorists again, Amar goes to Ladakh and is surprised to meet Meghna on the same bus. He spends the night with her in a ruined city, but she deserts him while he sleeps.

Broken-hearted, Amar returns to Delhi where his parents are arranging a marriage for him. He agrees to marry the new girl. Meanwhile the terrorists have moved to Delhi to carry out a bombing campaign. On the day of Amar's engagement party Meghna turns up and asks him for a job and a place to stay. Amar lets her stay at the family house. Having seen one of Meghna's brothers in town, Amar becomes suspicious and goes through her belongings. He realises Meghna and her brothers are terrorists.

He tries unsuccessfully to convince her to run away with him. As celebrations for the fiftieth year of independence start, Amar finds Meghna strapped with explosives for a suicide bombing. He threatens to hug her hard if she doesn't tell him whether she loves him or not; she confesses her love for him but refuses to give up her mission. Amar embraces her and the bomb explodes.

Review

Dil Se.. may lack the narrative coherence of Mani Ratnam's previous films Roja (in which Kashmiri terrorists abduct an oil official) and the massively successful Bombay (a Hindu-man-meets-Moslem-woman romance, set during Bombay's inter-religious riots of the early 90s), but as a commercial Indian film, it offers up a memorable massala of great songs, stars, striking cinematography and controversy. With the story set during the fiftieth anniversary of India and Pakistan's independence, Ratnam again tackles through a love story major political and cultural issues: terrorism in India's north-eastern states, the rise of separatist movements, and even the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi (alluded to by making love-interest Meghna a suicide bomber).

Unlike Ratnam's previous, smaller-budget, Tamil-language films, dubbed into Hindi for a broader market, Dil Se.. is a mainstream Hindi movie with big stars, including box-office favourite Shahrukh Khan. The film has to pull the subtle trick of being a star vehicle for Khan and navigating the social concerns for which Ratnam is known. This generates a certain stylistic disparity. Compare two key action scenes: in one, a terrorist attack becomes a surreal dance routine as Khan and crowds of children merrily bound between explosions. In another more realistic scene, young Meghna is seen on the verge of being raped by a soldier after members of her family have been graphically murdered.

Technically Dil Se.. is on a par with good-quality western cinema. Ratnam's regular cinematographer Santosh Sivan makes sophisticated use of widescreen for the stunning landscapes and lost citadels of arid Ladakh, while dramatic pans tumble us over the superbly choreographed dance routine on top of a mountain train, set to the hit song 'Chaiyya Chaiyya'.

Typically for a Hindi film, Dil Se..'s success is partly accounted for by the pre-sales of its musical soundtrack. An estimated 100,000 copies were sold before its UK release. And if the numerous song-and-dance routines are scattered with less subtlety than those in Bombay, Dil Se..'s catchy hits still feature bankable talents, particularly playback-singer Lata Mangeshkar and music director A. R. Rahman.

However, the main actors seem miscast. Khan remains too glamorous and glossy to be believable as a complex, ordinary man thrown into a range of emotional and violent circumstances, while Manisha Koirala struggles between doing the good-girl role she played in Bombay and that of a cold-blooded kamikaze assassin. The film is saved by its finale where Ratnam's skill at characterisation wins through. Khan's Amar fights in desperation with Koirala's gelignite-wrapped Meghna, neatly illustrating her struggle between love and duty. Obviously, the formulaic boy-wins-girl happy ending isn't on the cards. After all, how can he take a suicide bomber home to his parents?

In the UK, South Asian audiences have turned out in droves to see Dil Se.., attracted by the film's music, stars and Ratnam's reputation as one of India's most original directors. In its first week of release in the UK the film grossed just over 250,000, becoming the first Hindi movie to appear in the top ten of the British box-office chart. Though it falls short of matching Bombay's grip and emotional immediacy, Dil Se.. is visually stunning, a high-impact film which stretches the limits of commercial Hindi cinema. Non-Hindi speakers may have an opportunity to appreciate it when the English-subtitled version is released in the new year.